Beyond the Psychological Wage: Du Bois on White Dominion

W.E.B. Du Bois’s reading of whiteness as a “public and psychological wage” is enormously influential. This essay examines another, lesser known facet of Du Bois’s account of racialized identity: his conceptualization of whiteness as dominion. In his 1920–1940 writings, “modern” whiteness appears as a proprietary orientation toward the planet in general and toward “darker peoples” in particular. This “title to the universe” is part of chattel slavery’s uneven afterlife, in which the historical fact of “propertized human life” endures as a racialized ethos of ownership. The essay examines how this “title” is expressed and reinforced in the twentieth century by the Jim Crow system of racial signs in the United States and by violent “colonial aggrandizement” worldwide. The analytic of white dominion, I argue, allows Du Bois to productively link phenomena often regarded as discrete, namely, domestic and global forms of white supremacy and practices of exploitation and dispossession. Ultimately, the entitlement Du Bois associates with whiteness is best understood as a pervasive, taken-for-granted horizon of perception, which facilitates the transaction of the “wage” but is not reducible to it.